


Hungry Shadows

by postcardsfromrussia



Series: Inconsequentiality [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Anorexia, Bulimia, Eating Disorders, F/M, Gen, Profanity, Substance Abuse, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-25
Updated: 2013-08-31
Packaged: 2017-12-06 11:07:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/734974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/postcardsfromrussia/pseuds/postcardsfromrussia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lucy Weasley is so damn tired of being normal. She wants to stand out. She wants to be full. More than anything, she wants to lose weight. And she does. She gets so thin that she begins to disintegrate.</p><p>Scorpius Malfoy has watched Lucy fall apart for the past year. He wants, more than anything, to help her get well. Much like Lucy, he feels like he hasn't done anything worth remembering. This, he thinks, could be his chance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. How I Forgot to Breathe

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to the excellent beta by both Maple (Maple_and_Pheonix_Feather) and Ellie (iLuna17.)
> 
> This story is about a girl with an eating disorder. As such, it contains graphic descriptions of what being anorexic and bulimic is like. If you believe that you might be triggered by reading this AT ALL, please do not read. Eating disorders is one of, if not the scariest thing I’ve ever had to research, because you are only fighting against yourself. I would not want to trigger anyone while they are trying to recover and enjoy a fic. However, since this is a story about a very sick girl and how she makes her way back to reality, it will contain descriptions of exactly what being anorectic and bulimic is like. Eating disorders are never something anyone should have to go through, and I do not advocate for them in the slightest. I apologise profusely if you feel triggered by this, but this is your warning against reading now.

I wasn’t the same weight as everyone else around me. Well, maybe I was, but I was all boobs and hips while they were all collarbones and long legs. I didn't like the fact that they could eat plates upon plates of food and not gain weight at all, while I was the polar opposite. To no fault of their own, they made me feel not good enough.

Roxanne called it _curvy._ She'd tell me , ‘Lucy, you’re so lucky.’

She called it curvy. I, in a more pessimistic way, called it _fat._

I didn’t like labeling myself fat, yet I could not think of any better term to describe myself. Perhaps that’s how it started. Perhaps I was simply looking for a better way to describe myself. A better label. 

Although, to this day, I don’t know why I would consider bulimic a better label than fat.

It’s no secret that almost every girl wants to centre her life around being thin,. but most never do anything about it. Most say I’ll start tomorrow or I really shouldn’t but I will. but I was so tired of being most girls that I chose to differ in the most horrible way possible. 

I skipped breakfast, most days. I'd make up for that at lunch, where I’d eat an entire plate and more. I ate things I didn’t like. (I hated shepherd’s pie, always will, and yet I ate an entire pie one day when I was trying to fill some empty void within me.) 

‘Are you okay?’ Albus would say as I scraped the bottom of the plate only to go back for more.

‘Yeah,’ I would say, ‘just starving, we got murdered at Quidditch practice.’

He nodded. Accepted it quicker than I thought he would. I’d stay at the table long after he and Roxanne had left, and then quietly rush up to the bathrooms and get rid of everything I’d just eaten. I’d walk out and examine my face in the mirror. My cheeks would be puffy, swollen; my eyes would be red. I’d splash water on my face, reapply my lipstick, and walk out. Everything was fine.

*

I’d say it was all about food, but it wasn’t, not really. Of course, food is how it started, but control is how it ended up. Or lack of control, really.

I told myself I had total control over everything. My hands shook when I was trying to cast spells in Charms class, but I was fine. Just fine.Even when I ate (and eat I did, all the time), therefore losing control, I would go upstairs to the toilets in a mindless blur, and regain control by losing what I’d just eaten.

God, there’s no way to put this delicately, is there? Putting fingers down my throat, hitting the gag spot, waiting. There weren’t charms for this, or if there were, I didn’t know them. Perhaps it was better the way it was--an animalistic urge to do this to myself, to hurt myself. It was the pain, really, that made it happen.

When I did walk out of the bathrooms, knees shaking, knuckles ripped and red, I felt as if there was some sort of huge sign above me reading _Fucked up._ I _was_ fucked up. More than anything I wanted someone to notice me, but more than anything I was scared that they would. 

Roxanne noticed something was wrong. She was the first to come up to me and say ‘Lucy, are you okay?’

‘Fine,’ I said. I was most certainly not fine. I was waiting for Roxanne to disagree with this, to say no Lucy this is not how it works, to make me stop hurting myself, but instead she only nodded and walked away.

Throwing up is an addiction, I think. You start off with ‘just this once’ and then continue on with ‘one more time’ and then before you know it, your life depends on how fast you can get to the toilets. Then, entirely empty, you look for something to fill you. Devoid of everything you once cared about, food is the only thing you can find - and afterwards, you beg yourself for forgiveness before your knees buckle and your head spins and you can’t even remember how to breathe.

*

People asked me how it started. Hell if I know, I said, and shrugged. It was a lie. I knew exactly how it had started. I, after missing Every Single Goal in a Quidditch match, walked inside for lunch. I was hungry, and I did not feel like I could ever be full.

The Great Hall was the best place for a bulimic to hide. At least that’s what I learned during my sixth year. I’m not going to my seventh year. They won’t let me. I don’t blame them. Too easy for me to fall back into my old habits.

Anyway, the plates would refill because I would keep eating and keep eating. I knew that I shouldn’t--I could almost feel my ass expanding, touching the other girls--but I did.

The showers were the second best place for a bulimic to hide. Going to take a shower, I’d say, right after breakfast and after supper. Turned on the shower, but turned to the toilets next to it. Forced two fingers down my throat--the sound was drowned out by the water. I learned these things well. Lunch was a harder affair. I’d go to the lesser used bathrooms, the ones that people didn’t like, or if there were people in it, I’d risk being late to class because I had to get what I was certain was poison out of my system.

I don’t tell them this. Bulimia was simply formed on a foundation of lies. I think that if only I can keep this foundation, I will still be sick, and therefore I can still be thinner. 

Even I know that this isn’t the case.

Hell if I know why I keep lying.

*

I used a system of markers. This is not something they tell you about. The other things, the things that you can’t find in books.

You eat the brightly coloured things first: that way, they come out first, and you know everything’s gone.

You drink a lot of milk. It counteracts the acid in your stomach. 

You always turn the water on before you go to the bathroom. That way, no one can hear what you’re about to do.

You lie. Eventually, you find out that everything you have done is based on one big lie. _I’m fine._

You refuse to admit the truth.

*

I’ve been in treatment for the last two months. I think, if I saw myself right now, I would laugh at who I’ve become. But then I think _how is that even possible_ , because I’ve learned that bulimia is not something you laugh about. It is not something that you ever hope to be. It is something that you do once, and then, unfortunately, do not have the willpower to stop.

Still, though, I have no desire to stop.

Mum and Molly come every week. They do at first, anyway. They don’t like talking to me. They don’t say it, but they almost certainly think I’m insane. On Sundays, when they are here, Healer Patil makes sure to come in with my medicine. When they’re here, I have to take it without complaining. Wouldn’t want them to think I’m even more fucked up. Normally I scream. Complain. It surprises me, the extent to which I refuse to get well.

There are other girls here too, at least. The other girls have figured out that in order to get out (and therefore be themselves, and be sick again) they must pretend to be well, at least for a while. I can’t accept this yet.

I don’t know why I can’t accept this. I can’t decide whether or not it’s because I am not ready to get well, or if it’s because I am not ready to become sick again.

*

When I first got here, I refused to get well, but not in the unresponsive to treatment way that I am stuck in now. After meals, I would excuse myself to the bathroom again, try to throw it up. The Healers, they didn’t fall for this. They came and got me: they weren’t the mindless idiots that I had percieved them as. I didn’t try that again.

Most wizarding diseases have different names in the Muggle world. Bulimia does not. Quite literally, it means ox hunger. I did not, and still don’t like that name. ‘How,’ I asked Healer Patil once, ‘are we supposed to believe that we aren’t fat when even the name says that we are?’ She did not answer.

‘Come on, Lucy,’ Mum would tell me. ‘Just eat already.’ Mum didn’t understand that it was not that simple.

The food had charms cast on it to prevent me from throwing it up. Not like they’d give me a chance to leave the room long enough anyway. If I couldn’t throw it up, I reasoned, it would only make sense that I should not eat the food at all.

And Healer Patil says I’m _recovering._

Recovering is a loaded word, especially over here. It is a process. It is here-we-go-I’m-getting-well-until-I-eat-those-candies. I realised, with a bitter taste in my mouth, that _well_ and _fat_ were synonymous with each other, at least in my mind. I did not want to be fat, therefore, I could not be well.

But I couldn’t throw up. I couldn’t. Even in treatment, bulimia was classified as something Less Dangerous than anorexia. I just had to eat a little food and not throw it up, and then I was well. That, to me, was not good enough. I was not good enough.

But I was not _good_ at starving myself. So used to the animalistic tendencies of binging and purging, I could not immediately integrate myself into the much more cerebral form of disorder that the Healers call anorexia.

I liked the meaning of anorexia much more. Rather than reminding me of an ox, it meant lack of appetite, lack of desire. It’s pretty, isn’t it? Lack of desire. I no longer desired to do anything, not eat, not sleep. You could see my collarbones, now.

‘She’s getting worse,’ I heard Healer Patil say outside my door to Mum.

‘She’s not throwing up anymore, though,’ Mum said. (I didn’t know how Mum knew that.)

‘I don’t mean the bulimia.’ And I didn’t know how Healer Patil knew that, either. All that I could see in myself were the lines of my collarbones, the curves of my hipbones. I did not hear the hummingbird beat of my heart, nor did I see my dull lifeless eyes or feel the rock of walking that came with being constantly tired. We only see what we want to, us sick ones. That’s why I did not realise that Healer Patil was watching my every move. Why I did not notice the way that I could not stand up anymore without being horribly lightheaded.

Why I did, and still do, believe that I was fat.

*

Scorpius came sometimes. I liked Scorpius. He didn’t look down upon me for being sick, rather, he only wanted to help me. I didn’t mind when people wanted to help me. In a way, it was what I had wanted all along: someone to help me get better. Or perhaps just to notice that something was wrong.

‘You’re getting too thin,’ he told me. ‘Eat something. For me.’

I came to realise that the only times I ate anymore were with him.

We were, Scorpius told me, distantly related to those worth knowing. We were the children of the hungry shadows (a label that fit me particularly well), the son and the daughter of someone almost special. I told Scorpius his father was special - if not on particularly good terms with my own - but he only shook his head.

“He could have done something for either side,” Scorpius explained, “and he did something for neither.”

Then I felt quite a bit like Scorpius’s father. I was sure that I wanted to be well. I was perfectly willing to be well, as long as well did not involve having to eat any food or gain any weight. I did not want to die. I wanted to be so thin that I would no longer be limited to the hard, hungry earth. I wanted to be like a bird, lighter than air. Unlike so many people who simply wanted to sink beneath the ground and never return, I wanted to fly.


	2. Everything and Nothing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm stating again that this is a story about an **eating disorder.** I don't want anyone to be triggered by this  & if you believe you might be, please go read something else. :)
> 
> Thank you for the fabulous beta-ing job by Maple (Maple_and_Pheonix_Feather)
> 
> * * *

My release was not about being well. It was about being well enough, about being heavy _enough_ , about being _enough_. I was not well when I was released. I knew this . Worse was the fact that I was finally ready to accept the idea of getting well when I was released into a world where nobody followed the strict rules that I was expected to adhere to simply to remain out of the hospital - let alone truly be healthy. To many people, my release was _here we go, she weighs enough_. No one was paying attention to the fact that I was broken, perhaps irreversibly.

I came home secluded. My mother was scared for me, my sister was scared of me, and I did not think that my father had ever really understood what was wrong with me. I spent my days alone in my room, wondering how my life had fractured apart like this. I didn't speak to anybody .

Well, no. That’s not exactly true. I spoke to Scorpius on an almost daily basis. Neither my mother nor my father were particularly pleased with this, which was part of why I continued to do it. It was not that they didn’t like Scorpius, and much more so that they didn’t like his family. They told me that he was not a good influence, until I pointed out that he was the only one who had prevented me from starving myself to death and they, reluctantly, permitted me to continue seeing him. I sat cross-legged on my bed and he across from me. We would talk for hours about everything and nothing all at once.

I would smile and laugh until the horrible time when he would ask me, “What are you eating?”

And then I’d look down.

I was eating. I was eating amounts that seemed perfectly reasonable to me. I weighed far below the spectrum of what was normal (and healthy) - yet it was a number that I thought I could possibly bring myself to be happy with. Scorpius, on the other hand, was utterly terrified with the food I told him I ate - an apple. Crackers. Half a rice cake, covered in peanut butter. Slivers of Chocolate Frogs cut off with a knife, piece by piece.

“It’s not enough,” he told me. “You’re not enough.”

If this, right now, was not enough, then I did not think I had the strength to be enough.

I did not like talking to Healer Patil about what had made me crumble into an infinite number of pieces (nor did I think Healer Patil liked talking to me. She could not fix a disease of the mind like she could mend a broken bone. It was just as hard for her to watch me fall apart as it was for me to fall apart.) but I did not mind talking to Scorpius about it.

“It’s hard to explain,” I’d say, sitting on the very edge of my bed as, day by day, he moved closer to me. “You wouldn’t understand, either.”

And then he’d smile. “Try me,” he’d say waspishly.

Scorpius had been my friend for as long as I could remember. He was two years older than me, which had been terrifying in the beginning, annoying more than anything when he was at Hogwarts and I was not, and comforting now that he was the only person that I trusted. I, barely eighteen years old, had not seen anything besides my home, Hogwarts, and the hospital. I had hardly even managed to finish my seventh year: I spent the last few months in the hospital frantically studying for my NEWTS (with Scorpius by my side, of course.). He, at not quite twenty, had seemed annoyed with me when I was younger: to be expected, of course, by someone still proud of their age. Now, he had mellowed and was simply comforting. Something I needed more than anything.

“I’m so bloody normal,” I began. “So bloody normal it terrifies me. I had to do something different, Scorpius. I had to be something different. I’m a Weasley, but hardly. All the rest of us have done something important. Not me. I wanted someone to notice me,” I said, and I was nearly crying, now, “and everyone did.”

Scorpius reached for me. I let him. It was strange that it was only now that I broke down in tears, after months in treatment, but that did not come to me until much later. For now, I simply collapsed in his arms, showing more emotion than I had in months and months (which was strange, now that I thought of it, because I’d only ever felt that I was overflowing).

*

I moved out.

This did not come about simply. My parents were still so worried for me - _Lucy you’re still too thin, you have to promise you’re going to eat you have to_ ¬and a waterfall of a million other emotions - and were not inclined to let me do anything on my own. It was only when I pulled the age card and reminded them that I was only there because I had nowhere else to go that they relented. I swore up and down that Roxanne and Scorpius would come and check on me every day and let them stock my pantry with every sort of food they could think of (that I had no plans of eating, but I also had no plans of letting them know that). The sheer idea of eating something- everything in that pantry, really- so large and thick and fatty was beyond me.

Scorpius did come every day. He always ate lunch with me and stayed for hours afterward, so I couldn’t throw it all up in a feverish rush of pain and sheer power. Sometimes, he came for dinner, too, but not always. He told me, with a sad expression on his face, that he had to settle arguments between his family: the triangulated child of a traditionally painful arranged marriage. My mouth felt bitter when he told me that, and in some delayed realisation, it struck me that Scorpius, really, was the strongest person I had ever known.

If Scorpius was the strongest, than I was more and more positive by the day that I was the weakest. I only ever ate between one and two meals a day, and bit my lip by the fireplace while I struggled with the urge to throw it up.

“Sometimes,” Scorpius told me over lunch one day (two sandwiches. an apple. milk. six hundred calories.), “people who have every right to be perfectly happy aren’t. Sometimes you can have everything you want, and need, and still feel like you have nothing at all.” He paused, and looked at me. “But, Lucy, I’m so sorry that you have to be one of those people.”

“I never wanted to be,” I said. My being on the brink of tears was becoming more and more common when I talked to people. I was not sure if that was because I was becoming more open (like all the Healers told me to be!) or because I was continuing to self destruct, crumbling away until, like I desired, there was nothing at all left of me. “Oh, God, Scorpius, why does it have to be so hard for me to be happy?”

He closed his eyes, and his hands shook. “None of us are happy, anymore.”

“No,” I said. “Neither of us.”

*

I was drunk.

I hadn’t expected to get this drunk. With only a few glasses of what I hoped was whisky, I didn’t know what I had expected. I’d hoped, almost, that everything would disappear and I’d feel what could be happiness for the first time in forever. Instead, I didn’t know what I was feeling, but it couldn’t be happiness. I felt dizzy, almost overly so, and I needed Scorpius.

Soon enough, he rang at my door. That was good. Meant it wasn’t a bad night with his family - something that occurred far too often. I opened the door with a flick of my wand, and he entered.

“Magic is great,” I told him as he walked towards me. “I didn’t even have to get up to open the door for you.”

He took one look at me and started laughing. “Lucy! How drunk are you?”

“Enough,” I said. His hair was very blonde, and I was more and more intrigued by this. I wanted to run my hands through it and see what would happen.

“How much did you drink?” He began to take food out of the cupboards. I shrunk away from him immediately, but was finding it harder and harder to remember why that was.

“Not enough,” I answered, laughing at nothing particularly funny and waiting for him to come over to me and tell me, in a smooth, caring voice, that I was being ridiculous, which I knew I was. I wanted him to sew a tapestry of words to make me feel better.

I wanted him to kiss me.

“Scorpius, do you like me?” I asked him all of a sudden, not sure of the sort of response I wanted. He turned around, distracted from setting something terrifyingly edible on the island counter.

“Of course,” he said, paying no attention to it (while the words carried a brunt of truth that made me shiver even more than I already was.) It was extraordinarily difficult for me to think. I could not picture what Scorpius was thinking, but then again, I was not sure I wanted to. I liked being drunk. For the first time in what felt like forever, I felt like I was enough.

“No,” I said, frustrated at my apparent inability to communicate. “Do you love me?” I laid extra emphasis on the word. “I think I do too, I think.”

Scorpius looked at me, and there was some glimpse of tortorous pain in his eyes before he, in a haunted, treacherous tone, said, “Of course.”

The entire world seemed to stop, or perhaps it was just my head spinning that made it seem like everything else was going so much slower. I rubbed my collarbone and pinched my wrist, all the way around, to feel the bone. I stood up and almost fell over from lightheadedness, unsure if this had to do with how thin I was or how very drunk I seemed to be. Probably both.

It only took a few seconds before I, wobbly on the balls of my feet, collapsed into what I thought might have been Scorpius’s arms.

*

I woke up with a dreaded sort of nausea I had not been allowed to feel for months upon end. Vaguely, with a bit of blurriness around the edges, I saw Scorpius moving around a bed I did not remember getting in. “What the hell happened?” I asked. My mouth felt like cotton balls and tasted like pennies .

He looked up to me and propped my pillows up so I was sitting upright. It gave my head a painful jolt that, after months of bulimia, I had almost gotten used to. “You happened. You thought it would be a good idea to drink yourself to hell, Lucy. Remember?”

“Almost,” I said, although very little memory of the night was coming back to me save the achingly full feeling. “I passed out, didn’t I?”

“That you did,” Scorpius said. “You fucked up again, Lucy, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t love you for it.” He paused to hand me a glass of water. “Do you remember what you told me?”

“No. I hope it wasn’t too terrible,” I said, morbidly (but genuinely) curious. He looked down and away from me while I took a very small sip of the water and felt awfully nauseous all over again.

“Lucy,” Scorpius said in an extraordinarily awkward tone of voice, “you told me you might be in love with me.”

“Oh,” I said, sounding very small. A small voice for a small word. Scorpius looked at me, almost expectantly. “What if I meant it?” I asked.

“Then we have a lot to talk about,” he said, but the corner of his eyes and a hint of a smile gave something away.

I ate breakfast that day. It was the first time since I’d moved out of my parents’ house that I had.

*

Scorpius told me that I was still sick, to the point that it scared him to love me. Little though I cared to admit it, though, I was starting to wonder whether I might be getting well. I had learned, through Scorpius more than anyone, that my sickness had very little to do with my weight, yet my weight was what was causing all of my issues that remained.

I told Scorpius this. He looked at me, his eyes softened, and, like all I had ever wanted, I felt like a bird, loose above the ground, flying. I felt like I was more than a shadow. I felt, I thought, like I was more than anything.  


**Author's Note:**

> This was such a fascinating yet horrible topic to write about, and I really hope I've handled it well. I drew very heavily upon the use of the Internet, blogs and message boards, in addition to the wonderfully terrifying novel Wasted by Marya Hornbacher. Please let me know your thoughts in the review box below!


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